in between

Jutta Nase lives and works in Berlin. She studied in Düsseldorf with Prof. Beuys and Prof. Sackenheim, and at the HdK Berlin with Prof. Kaufmann and Prof. Hacker.

In recent years she has been concerned above all with processes of recollection and memory, as in her new pictures, which she is showing in Essen, Berlin and Munich.

She calls them “Letters” (“Briefe”).

Her raw material is old photographic portraits, which she manipulates, reworks and reinvents in the photocopier, by painting over them and by using a script of signs of her own. The works show a crossover of diverse techniques, genres and media: everyday photography, copy-art elements, painting and sign-script or script-signs interact.

The photographs as the starting point of each “Letter” set processes of recollection in motion, and the works trace their differing courses. Conversely, memories sometimes come first, prompting the artist to search for old photographs and to develop from them picture-letters, letter-pictures, that move between persons and times.

In their method of production as in their effect, the works can be compared to palimpsests. The memory media of image and writing, past and present, are joined into communicating layers. They blur and obscure, complement and illuminate one another at the same time. Script formations and picture-scripts emerge that wish to be read – or, above all, looked at – between the lines: in between, precisely.